


Breaking Steel

by Im_The_Doctor (Bofur1)



Series: The Pacemakers [15]
Category: Transformers Generation One
Genre: Ambushes and Sneak Attacks, Arrogance, Bullying, Concern, Drinking & Talking, Energon, Explanations, Happy Ending, Hurt/Comfort, Insults, Late at Night, Major Character Injury, Multi, OT6, Pace Mates, Protectiveness, Size Difference, Storytelling, Team as Family, Threats
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-27
Updated: 2015-03-27
Packaged: 2018-03-19 20:44:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,156
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3623688
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bofur1/pseuds/Im_The_Doctor
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When a Bot considers the lowest and dirtiest, they come up with two things: turning traitor or bullying a fellow Autobot. Essentially the same thing.</p><p>When a Bot considers who has the least tolerance for the lowest and dirtiest, they come up with six things: the Minibots. Essentially a family. A couple of the larger Bots must be taught to appreciate the concept.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Breaking Steel

**Author's Note:**

> If you're _extremely _sensitive about insults/bullying (like insults to height), you might not want to read. I'm making a couple of the Bots act like real jerks, perhaps a bit OOC-ishly so. Just assume this is early on, when everyone is still getting to know each other and some types clash. Don't worry, though, everything will turn out in the end!__

Gears ran a hand along the doors he was passing to steady himself as his feet threatened to slip out from under him. The energon trail he was leaving didn’t help anything either. Venting in a pained hiss, he checked the wound and winced, coming to a halt in front of the ‘family’ quarters.

Usually he and the rest of the Minibots were okay with sharing a room. They were all relatively the same size, so it seemed the same amount of space to all of them, as long as no one got too messy and put their things all over the place. Besides, if any of them had a particularly bad spat and wanted to be alone, there were always extra quarters that they could stomp off to until morning. It wasn’t perfect, but it was decent.

Now Gears was dreading these next few steps. Hopefully most of them would be recharging already and wouldn’t ask questions. At last Gears punched in the code and entered, ready to cross the room and crawl into his berth as quickly as possible. Instead he was shocked to find everyone up and alert, situated in a squished oval formation on the floor with cubes of varying-grades of energon all around.

“…And when Starscream says ‘Regroup’, I manage to grab hold o’ Skywarp just in time. I get popped off right next to Screamer!” Brawn was narrating animatedly, his usual grin, made even bigger by the fly-high effects of high-grade, nearly splitting his face. “I leap right on top o’ him—”

“Gears!” Cliffjumper cut in, gesturing eagerly for the frozen Minibot to come closer. “C’mon, you’re just about to catch the best part!”

“I was there, Cliff,” Gears protested wearily as all optics turned toward him expectantly. “I saw it; we all did.” He huddled into himself, wishing he could simply stay in the doorway. With the light from the hallway behind him, they could only see his silhouette.

“So what? It’s a good story!” Brawn declared indignantly.

“I gotta recharge,” Gears muttered. With that he bolted for the safety of his berth, trying to escape the inevitable. Before he could, Windcharger stuck out his arm and tripped him, causing him to flail and land hard with a scream of pain that startled them all.

“Charger!” Bumblebee started to scold, but Huffer cut him off with frantic pointing and an alarmed outcry of “Gears!”

When they followed the engineer’s finger, they saw Gears propping himself on one elbow, his right arm pressed against his chassis, but it was the energon trickling _along_ his arm into a puddle on the floor that brought them all reeling to attention.

Gears barely had time to open his mouth before he was being picked up by three different pairs of arms and pulled in three different directions. Finally Brawn managed to shout over the following three-way argument, “Just prop him up against the wall!”

After he had been slammed into said wall with unnecessary force, Gears blinked a few times to clear his vision and found the other five members of the Minibot sextet crowded in around him, confronting him with one combined stare. Gears fidgeted uneasily, pressing his arm closer against his chest.

“N-Nothing’s wrong,” he stammered, almost immediately answered by a disbelieving scoff from Cliffjumper.

“You, not complaining—that’s the first sign that _everything_ is wrong!”

“What happened?” Brawn asked sternly. “Why’s your arm bleeding?”

“It’s not!” Gears protested, holding up his other hand against the rest of the Bots scoffing. Steeling himself, he peeled his arm away from his chassis.

“Primus,” Windcharger and Cliffjumper blasphemed together, while the others remained mute in their shock. A long gash ran at a forty-five degree angle along Gears’ abdomen, cracks creeping out from it into the metal surrounding.

“What. Happened?” Brawn growled again through the grinding cogs of his jaw.

Gears knew Brawn’s ire wasn’t directed at him, but he still grimaced. “A couple of the other Bots were pushin’ me around—it was nothing much—and I fell on the energon stockpile in the rec room. You know how sharp those energon container fragments are; one of ’em gave me this.”

There was a moment of silence. “You think we don’t know a battle wound when we see one?” Bumblebee asked quietly.

“What do you mean when you say a couple of Bots were ‘pushing you around’?” Huffer asked suspiciously.

Gears threw his helm back against the wall behind him, releasing all of his vents in a long, exasperated sigh. “Fine, fine! I got in a fight. I _did_ get pushed, I _did_ fall on the energon and then one of my _brutal foes_ grabbed a good chunk of cybre-glass and cut me with it. There, ya happy, ya satisfied?”

“No! Fraggit, Gears, I’m _not_ happy!” Windcharger barked. “Who did it to you?”

“Sideswipe and Sunstreaker,” Gears burst out, throwing up his hands. “Sideswipe laughed at me when I couldn’t reach a shelf, so I punched him, and Sunstreaker returned the favor. At first the cybre-glass only scratched me—y’know how our armor is—but Sunstreaker kept it up until it stuck. He kicked me a few good times, insulted me and chucked me out onto my face.” Gears laughed bitterly, shaking his helm, and spat, “He called me _Mini_ Mouse.”

The cold rage that had been building in the huddle around him cracked like lightning, heightened (in a regrettably figurative way) by the charging drink they’d been consuming for who knew how long before Gears had appeared. The other five mechs were all try to shout over each other and before anyone knew what was happening another fight was erupting in their own room. Somehow Cliffjumper ended up on top of Huffer, who struggled quite admirably and spilled three energon cubes in the process, with Windcharger trying to pry them away from each other. Gears took this opportunity to slip past them toward his berth, but Bumblebee stopped him.

“Ratchet ought to patch you up,” he pointed out.

“Tomorrow,” Gears brushed Bee off, shrugging out of his grip, but the scout was insistent, grabbing his elbow with a firmer touch.

“At least let me bandage it up.” Gears finally relented and when Bee was finished, he turned his face to the wall and curled into himself, waiting for the noise to die out.

Eventually it did and Gears became fully aware of ten optics latching onto his back. “I’m fine,” he called out, trying to sound pleasant. “Go to recharge, will ya? You’re creeping me out.”

Gears could tell it was Brawn who gave in to begin with, with a deep sigh of reluctance. Bee next—Gears heard him struggle to lift himself up onto his berth; he’d it winched a few inches too high and never found the time to bring it down. The others followed one by one, each with varying degrees of aversion to it, but eventually they all settled into recharge, lulled by the presence of the others.

Even having been the first to ‘retire’, Gears was the last of them to power down.

—

“Sunny.” Sideswipe nudged his brother and motioned with his helm toward the door of the rec room. “Look who it is.”

“The Bitty Bunch,” Sunstreaker chuckled, smirking as he sipped his energon. “Down a member, I see.”

Sideswipe raised his eyebrows. “Think you hurt Gears worse than you thought?”

“Nah.” Smiling wider, Sunstreaker made sure his voice carried a bit as he replied, “I wouldn’t _short_ -change Gears out of a quick recovery.”

Almost as one, the Minibots froze in the middle of the room.

Sideswipe badly suppressed a snort of laughter and Sunstreaker found that encouraging, so he continued. “Besides, his team would suffer. Sides, help me out with this: If you have…mm…three pints of somethin’ and take away a _half-pint_ , how many half-pints are left?”

“Five!” Sideswipe exclaimed.

“Nice job, bro!” Sunstreaker congratulated him with overenthusiasm. “You figured it out. You can hold your helm _high_ now. Ah, sorry, that one _lowered_ the bar.”

Sideswipe nearly choked trying to stifle his laughter then, but when Sunstreaker glanced over to see how the Minibots were taking it, he was surprised to see that all of them had vanished except Bumblebee. Nodding in satisfaction, he finished off his energon and disposed of it. “I’m heading for the wash racks, Sides, I’ll see you later.” He stood, winked obnoxiously at Bumblebee as he passed, and took his leave.

The wash racks were quiet and still when Sunstreaker entered them, keying in a temporary locking code for privacy. When he turned back around to decide which rack he wanted, he was caught completely off-guard by a solid blow to his crotch. It sent him to his knees almost instantly, keening in agony.

“Oh, sorry,” Cliffjumper greeted him sarcastically. “That was a _low_ blow…”

“But it brings you _down to size_ ,” Windcharger finished, materializing to his left. “Let’s get this show on the road. We’ve been looking you up and down—though, I will admit, mostly up—for a while, Sunstreaker, and we’ve decided you’ve got a major fault.”

“Your alternate mode’s roof needs to be adjusted,” Cliffjumper explained with a feral smile. “And we’ll do you that favor.”

“Don’t worry. Our price isn’t too _steep_. It’ll just cost you the roof.”

Staggering to his feet, Sunstreaker clenched his fists. “If you want a fight—” Before he could finish that sentence, something struck him hard in the back of the knee, sending him back down. A weight throwing itself onto his back sent his face into the washroom floor and then there was a voice hissing next to his audial, more menacing than he had ever thought it could be.

“No. We just want to make something very, _very_ clear,” Huffer snarled, his hands slipping around the back of Sunstreaker’s neck. “You may be a helm taller than us, but that defect can be _easily_ removed.”

“If you ever make another remotely derogatory remark in our presence, if you step too close to any of us,” Brawn added as he emerged on the right, “we will gladly become traitors by killing you. That would give us more dignity than letting you think you can lord yourself above us.”

Sunstreaker started to snap at him, but Huffer squeezed his throat like a cobra coiling around him and he reconsidered his next words. “How…how did you know I’d be in here?” he rasped.

The doors behind him had automatically unlocked after a few minutes and as if on cue they opened. “I’m a scout, Sunstreaker,” Bumblebee reminded him resentfully. “Do you think for your sake I wouldn’t message the rest of my team and tell them where you were going?”

“We don’t know each other very well yet,” Windcharger admitted pleasantly, crouching down in Sunstreaker’s peripheral vision. “But we thought it would be good of us to get your helm out of the clouds and lay down a few ground rules.”

“And we’ll make sure _this_ sun doesn’t rise until they’re learned well,” Cliffjumper agreed. Sunstreaker barely had time to cringe before the rest of the mechs plunged.

—

Gears studied his team warily as they met him outside their chambers with solemn faces. “What did you do?” he asked, his hand falling over the new plating across his chassis.

“We politely asked Sunstreaker to pick on someone his own size,” Huffer said sourly, unconsciously following Gears’ example and rubbing at a new scratch on his arm.

“And he agreed to, as well as…pass the message along to his brother,” Brawn added with even less cheer, opening the door and leading them to file in one by one. Gears paused in the doorway and was struck with a sensation that the humans called déjà vu.

“I’ll be right back,” he assured the rest, backing up before turning and hurrying back down the hall, much to their surprise. When he returned, he was juggling six energon cubes. “Why don’t you shake off your sour mood by getting a little overcharged and telling me all about it?” he asked with a grin. The others glanced at each other hesitantly, so Gears rolled his optics and complained, “C’mon, none of you have suddenly _grown up_ , have you?” He snapped his mouth closed abruptly, so the last word was a little warped, but everyone else was in too much shock to really notice.

At last Brawn ducked his helm, trying to hide his smile as he said, “Um, no. I don’t think that’s going to happen any time soon.”

Gears nodded curtly and tossed a cube to each of them before settling onto his berth. Each mech turned from each other to do the same, only to be stopped by a series of dull clangs.

“Scrap,” Bumblebee sighed, rubbing his tailpipe from where he’d fallen on it. “Guys…My berth's too high. Can we please sit on the floor?”


End file.
